[forum] history, vision, and politics

[David Dawes]

Since we're looking at history, we can see that Jim is in the postion
he is in because of his lack of vision and lack of confidence in
the very technology that he helped create.  He abandoned X as a
dead technology long ago.  He didn't have the vision to see where
the burst of activity in the early 1990's that saw the emergence
of Linux and other free operating systems would lead.  He failed
to see that X as a technology could play a pivotal part in these
developments.  This role was left to others, and was expressed
through XFree86, predominantly by volunteers.  It wasn't until 1999
when Linux was gaining significant credibility in the business world
that Jim realised his mistake, and started publicly bullying the
people who had done what he was incapable of, in an attempt to
regain control of what he had abandoned as dead.

Five years later, he and others are still using the resources that
only large companies can muster in an effort to take out the
embarrasing volunteers.  The current culmination of this five year
effort is yet another re-make of the old X Consortium under a
different guise.  What will come of the new foundation?  Only time
will tell.  My advice is that everyone should take full advantage
of its sensitivity to bad publicity, and its desire to appear
inclusive and relevant.  It looks like a good opportunity to encode
a lot of new stuff as formal "X.Org" standards, not to mention to
get your favourite new code into their release tree.  Maybe the
vendor members will be inspired to Open Source their entire proprietary
X source trees too, given how strongly they seem to feel about how
X technology should be licensed.  How all of these things are handled
will be the real test of the rhetoric.  Strike while the iron is
hot!

The X.Org foundation may be set up to not look like a vendor
consortium on the surface, but it is still reliant primarily on the
traditional vendors for its funding model.  History has shown what
happens with this type of model in the X world.  If the technology
falls out of favour again, or if the vendors feel that they are
best served by the supression of new development, then the funding
will once again dry up, and/or the activity will cease.  The X
Consortium died because it couldn't find a sustainable funding model
(i.e., the vendors using the technology no longer had any interest
in supporting the consoritum).

X.Org was heading the same way, with one major sponsor vendor after
another dropping their membership level or withdrawing altogether.
Its demise wasn't far off.  The whole X.Org phase was one of marking
time anyway, as was evidenced by the lack of new work, the lack of
responsiveness to external contributions, and the inability to
follow through on even basic standardisation work.  I attended
weekly X.Org phone meetings for a few years.  It was a picture of
inertia, inaction, and the supression of anything useful.  At the
same time they couldn't figure out why they weren't taken seriously,
given this was supposed to be a new, relevant group, not plagued
with the problems of the old Consortium or The Open Group.  Well,
the end result was about the same.

Only the future will show if the warmed-over foundation will be any
different.  The names and faces behind the scenes are the same, the
funding source is essentially the same as it has always been.
They make a big deal about governance, but that becomes irrelevant
when the funding dries up because of the heavy reliance on
non-volunteers.  I'm putting my bet on the side of history.

David